Hmm. I can't ping any of those addresses. How do you connect to the internet (56k/ cable/ethernet from home/school/work/LAN)?

btw--the downloads.dat and downloads.bak files store the info about partial downloads (like a map or index of what pieces of the file have been received). They will be recreated if deleted. I'm surprised to hear one was in your Shared folder.

You can reduce the number of local hosts in the advanced options in the new beta details/links/discussion here.

Another option might be to get a list of hosts from a friend who has more varied connections. (They are stored in the gnutella.net file somewhere on your hard drive). I haven't tried this, but read about this elsewhere.

You can manually add a host in the box on the connections pane, but that's not really a solution.

Usually it's best to leave the connections alone and let the code pick the best combinations.

Search for posts by verdyp. He knows the network very well and definitely would have much more info.